Even in the early days of television in India, when Doordarshan was not even a colour show nor was it round the clock, it started playing havoc with cinema houses with the Sunday movie or morning serial programmes like the Ramayana and later the Mahabharata. Cinemas started being deserted on Sunday evenings, which would normally be the time for full houses and high box office collections. The early morning shows may not have been big money collectors but there were cine goers galore. All this started playing havoc with Bollywood and when afternoon pictures started being telecast, it was one more blow. But that is history.

Now there are a good dozen or more cinema channels in English, Hindi and other Indian languages, besides French thrown in, leave alone a Korean channel. Twenty-five years ago, the cost of a film, even a fairly high profile one, ran into lakhs of rupees and rare was a production like Pakeeza or Mughal-e-Azam, which might have cost a crore of rupees. But a crore of those days was value for money. Inflation has reduced a crore of rupees for spender producers to peanuts. Now Devdas has cost Rs. 50 crore to make and that is an Indian record, yet to be beaten, although Indian film makers like Manoj Night Shyamalan and Shekhar Kapoor are spending dollars by the millions to make world class films; not their own
money but they have financiers to bankroll them or production houses to take care of their fantasies.

But life is a great teacher. How the producers of Bollywood have learnt to live with reality and the times. Not only the producers, but also the cinema house owners, many of whom were forced to close shop and the properties started deteriorating and becoming derelict. Yet some of them re-arranged the structures by recreating them as shopping centres or small office complexes. But the smartest of the lot demolished their old, perhaps not very old buildings and recreated multiplexes, very modern indeed with a lot of modern facilities, including eateries and shops and play areas for the young, besides some office space. The multiplexes solved the problem by providing 150-odd seats each in four theatres with common ticketing outlets and different films at different times.

The ticket prices have shot up four or fivefold to Rs. 100 to Rs. 150 a seat. But for the young with higher salaries than ever, it is not a problem for an evening’s outing with a snack or a cold drink thrown in. It is cheaper than going to a plush restaurant, or a five-star hotel. That is the name of the game.

One should have thought that in a country where people live in very small flats or the young who can’t agree to be locked up in a room even with the idiot box in action, there would always be the cinema as a good alternative. In a way, multiplexes have attended to that sort of thinking. But Bollywood, more than the regional cinema, has been in the throes of a crisis as blockbusters have become rare. The cinema which is an exception to the regional production centres’ dedication is Tollywood, which was quite wiped out, but is trying to revive itself. This year and last year, since the beginning of the New Millennium, there have been only one or two blockbusters in a whole 12 months.

What a fall for an industry which ruled the hearts of the young and the old, which fed their fantasies, which made their dreams of love feel real. Those were the days when films ran for months, not just 100 days, and sometimes six months or a year in theatres and were celebrated with great elan. It was a record like the Sachin Tendulkar centuries or 10,000 or 20,000 runs in international cricket. Now one producer says openly that it is a great thing if they can have a film having a blast for a full week in one theatre and collections do not drop after the three-day week-end beginning Friday. What a fate!

Yet Bollywood remains the world’s largest producer of films, leave alone the bad times. There appear to be people who are willing to bet their money whether a film makes money or not. The lure is too great to rest. The glamour and glitz are too good to give up. Leave alone the Mafia money, leave alone the corporatisation of the industry when actors are turning producers in a bag when they have had their day. Leave alone the actors’ yen for starting eateries and using their charisma to attract people to their joints for a meal laced with their name: Sachin is the first among them all, though he is not a film man, to start the first of a string of restaurants to serve the dishes he is supposed to relish; they are well priced and yet not too high priced. So goes the story.

Yet where would Bollywood be but for the channels. They are the best advertising medium for films in the making and about to be released, not only with paid advertising but also programmes which list the best 10 flicks on show and what are the box office collections, plus a whole lot of interviews with the stars with celebrity interviews to boost the chances of a film.